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Cesare Pavese Quotes

1908–1950 Italy

Cesare Pavese (9 September, 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic and translator.

Italy
Communists
Journalists
Novelists
Poets

Random Cesare Pavese quote

118 quotes

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

This Business of Living (1935)

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.

This Business of Living (1935)

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

This Business of Living (1935)

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

This Business of Living (1935)

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

This Business of Living (1935)

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.

This Business of Living (1935)

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

This Business of Living (1935)

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.

This Business of Living (1935)

The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.

This Business of Living (1935)

Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.

This Business of Living (1935)

The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.

This Business of Living (1935)

Love is the cheapest of religions.

This Business of Living (1935)

Don't mix wine and women, Doro.

The Beach (1941)

I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.

The House on the Hill (1949)

A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.

This Business of Living (1935)

That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

This Business of Living (1935)

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

This Business of Living (1935)

This much is certain: you can have anything in life except a wife to call you "her man." And till now all your life was based on that hope.

This Business of Living (1935)

The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.

This Business of Living (1935)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Cesare Pavese (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.